Monday, April 27, 2015

Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, or more usually MDPI, is an open access publisher that has had a challenging few years. It has been charged with excessively spamming researchers in order to maximise APC revenue, it has been accused of publishing pseudoscience, and it has been criticised for publishing papers of very poor quality. This has occasionally led to editorial board resignations e.g. here and here.

The criticism came to a head in February last year, when University of Colorado (Denver) librarian Jeffrey Beall added MDPI to his controversial list of “Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers”.

Today I am publishing a Q&A with MDPI. First however, in the way of background, I want to rehearse some key events (in date order). Please scroll down if you want to go direct to the interview.= Update: Jeffrey Beall removed MDPI from his list on 27th October 2015 =** Update 22nd August 2018: Since posting this interview I have begun to wonder whether MDPI responds adequately to concerns people raise about its processes. E.g here. **

A target for criticism, but favoured by some

MDPI AG was spun out of Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI) in 2010 by the owner of both organisations Shu-Kun Lin, along with the then CEO of MDPI Dietrich Rordorf. In the process a number of journals were relocated to MDPI, and since then MDPI’s portfolio of open access journals has grown to 137. Last year MDPI published over 12,000 papers.

MDPI’s difficulties appear to have started in December 2010, when one of its journals — Life — published a paper by Erik Andruliscalled Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life. Aiming to present a framework to explain life, the paper was greeted with scepticism and ridicule. The popular science and technology magazines Ars Technica and Popular Science, for instance, characterised the ideas in the paper as “crazy” and “hilarious”.

The publication of the paper led to a member of Life’s editorial board resigning, and Shu-Kin Lin published a response to the criticism. In his response, Shu-Kin Lin conceded that he had taken over responsibility for the review process when the researcher assigned to the task (a Professor Bassez) has pulled out for personal reasons. But he insisted that the paper had been properly peer reviewed, and that it had been revised in response to the reports of two reviewers. His explanation, however, attracted further criticism.

In April 2011 a second controversy erupted when the MDPI journal Nutrients published a paper called The Australian Paradox: A Substantial Decline in Sugars Intake over the Same Timeframe that Overweight and Obesity Have Increased. This too attracted criticism, and an Australian economist created a website in order to launch a campaign to have the paper retracted. (There is also a Wikipedia page on the paper here).

The Australian Paradox paper has not been retracted, but it has twice been corrected by the authors (in 2011 and 2014), and in 2012 the Editor-in-Chief published an editorial about the paper, along with a response to the criticism from the authors. In addition, in July 2014 the University of Sydney (the institution where one of the authors is based) published an independent report concluding that of the seven criticisms that had been levelled at the authors the “only allegation substantiated concerned two ‘simple arithmetic’ errors, specifically an inconsistency and an incorrect calculation”.

Notwithstanding these controversies, MDPI has attracted many supporters, not least amongst OA advocates and cognoscenti of open access. When, on 31st October 2012, MDPI launched a new open access journal called Publications, for instance, it was able to recruit well-regarded scholars who specialise in research on open access to its editorial board. Currently, membership of the board includes Mikael Laakso and Bo-Christer Björk (Björk has also published in the journal), and at one time de facto leader of the open access movement Peter Suber also served on the board.

Finally, we could note that at one point Suber was also on the editorial board of Future Internet, an MDPI journal that in January 2010 published an article by Jeffrey Beall called Metadata for Name Disambiguation and Collocation (a contribution that Beall later said he regretted).

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

I recently agreed to co-publish four interviews with the ATG NewsChannel. The first of the Q&As is with librarian Marcus
Banks, and can be read on the Against the Grain website here
(or in the post below).

Marcus is a former editor-in-chief of the open access journal Biomedical Digital Libraries, a journal that had
to cease operations in 2008.

Amongst other things, Marcus discusses the lessons he learned from his
experience with Biomedical Digital
Libraries, the economics of OA publishing, and the possibility of journals
evolving into blogs.

Against the Grain publishes news
about libraries, publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents. Its goal is
to link publishers, vendors, and librarians by reporting on the issues,
literature, and people that impact the world of books and journals.